What the heck is waking up early related with Photography Tips, you may ask.. Well I’m now finally finishing the retouching of my photos of Rome from last October and I’m noticing that my photos at sunrise were actually way better than at sunset.

It’s a fact that the best natural light that you can have for your photos is at sunrise and at sunset. But for me, every time I woke up early, the weather gods would not help me at all.

That totally changed in Rome. Sunsets were far away from amazing and half of the days it was raining. At morning though, the skies were clear and with enough clouds to make the sky really interesting. I’m really happy that waking up at 5:30a.m everyday was worth it 🙂

I wrote a Post of the best Photography Tips to how to take better photos without spending money. One of the Photography Tips was light quality. Take a look at it if you haven’t read it already 😉

Photography Tips – Waking Up Early in Rome

Wandering in a city early in the morning is for me one of the best experiences of visiting a city. You have the place almost only for yourself and you can see the sun coming out. Think about it, you have the place exclusively for yourself. Other people may be on the same spot as you are but they are normally photo junkies like myself 🙂 hehe..I have actually talked with some interesting people this way.

If you try to visit the Trevi Fountain after 10a.m you can’t even see the water.. I’m really not joking.. There are crowds of people the whole day. Unfortunately I didn’t take a photo of it..

On the photo below, I only needed to remove two people from the shot, which wouldn’t be possible on an afternoon shot, at least not so easily..

The same applies to the Coliseum..at this time of the day, only the Street Sweeper is there..

Which after removing him and doing some corrections, looked like this:

The thing that I find a little bit difficult in the morning, is to have the right composition for the photo, because it’s dark. So it’s really important to do some scouting on the day before, to know what and how you are going to photograph.

Sometimes we can also have bad luck.. When I was in Bamberg, here in Germany, I woke up early to be at the right spot when the sun would come out, only to find that the lights of the building that I wanted to photograph, were turned off.. I was the day before there, but only at night and the lights were turned on. I had to return to the same place later that day at sunset, to photograph how I wanted :p

Are you an early riser photographer? You never thought about waking up early to take photos? Let me know in the comments below!